UB FOOTBALL: Tonawanda's Childress, one of world’s strongest men, helps UB build better players

By Jonah Bronstein
bronsteinj@gnnewspaper.com
 

AMHERST— Let there be lifts.
Football coaches often take over a new team intent on changing the way their players lift weights. Chris DeMarco inherited a Tonawanda High School program nearly two decades ago that barely had a weight room.
But DeMarco did enjoy the luxury of a sophomore lineman named Paul Childress.
Childress, who now works as the University at Buffalo football team’s assistant strength and conditioning coach, was already an avid lifter when he joined the Warriors. Dissatisfied with the universal exercise machine and incomplete dumbbell set scattered across a small classroom at Tonawanda, Childress helped DeMarco put together a worthy strength sanctuary.
“I had been lifting in my basement for a while,” Childress said recently. “Chris DeMarco came in and said we needed a weight room. We found some equipment and built our own. My father (John) was a construction worker. He welded together some squat racks and some benches.”
Childress went on to star in football and baseball as a senior, and, after a a redshirt season at Edinboro University, played four seasons at Buffalo State College, three of which ended with Childress claiming Division III All-American status.
But football success was just a detour from Childress’ passion: competitive powerlifting. He entered his first competition as a high school junior but didn’t devote himself to powerlifting until after getting his bachelor’s degree in health and wellness from Buffalo State in 1995.
Childress has set several world squat records in the 308-pound weight class, most recently in March at the Arnold Classic. That bar-bending 1,147-pound load was a far cry from weight set an 8-year-old Childress urged his parents to buy for him after watching the incredible feats of Fredonia’s Don Reinhout in World’s Strongest Man competitions.
“It was a cheap hollow bar and plastic weights with concrete in them,” Childress said. “I don’t even know if it weighed 100 pounds. But it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.”
Childress also holds a world record in the total lift, moving a combined 2,662 pounds in the squat, deadlift and bench press. “I love competing,” he said. “It makes all the hard work (in training) worthwhile. Some of my best friends I’ve met through competitions.”
Seven years ago Childress met renowned strength coach Buddy Morris at a powerlifting meet in Columbus, Ohio. After UB hired Morris last summer as Director of Sports Performance, he urged Childress, who had infrequently visited the UB weight room over the previous five seasons, to become more involved in the program.
Morris left UB in January for a similar position at Pittsburgh and Childress was hired as an assistant to new strength and conditioning coach Ryan Groneman.
“I think the biggest thing with Paul is the players walk in to the room and know that he is strong (by) just looking at him,” Groneman said. “And they know the numbers he’s done (in competitions). That makes our players more confident in what we’re having them do.”
“It’s easy for guys to look up to him,” said defensive end Trevor Scott, who added nearly 30 pounds of muscle during the off-season. “Coming from a guy who squats over 1,000 pounds, he definitely knows what he’s talking about. You really pay attention to what he says.”
Childress also holds a masters degree in exercise science from Canisius College and has written articles for the Web site EliteFTS.com. Still, Childress insists that time spent under the bar taught him the most
“I try to read something training, nutrition or rehab-related every day, but where you really learn is in the weight room,” he said. “You can go from an undergrad to a Ph.D. in exercise science and never have to set foot in the weight room. I don’t know how you pull that off, but you can. The book stuff is important, but not as much as the stuff in the weight room.”
That knowledge is now being passed along, rep by rep, inside UB’s new Robert and Carol Morris Sports Performance Center.
“I train them pretty much the same as I train myself,” Childress said. “It’s a little different because they have to take what they do in the weight room and apply it to the football field, so some things are different. But across the board, my goal as a strength coach is to get the players as strong as I can.”
“And the one way you get stronger,” Scott said, “is by lifting heavy weights.”
Contact reporter Jonah Bronstein at 282-2311, ext. 2261.

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